Dwindlehop wrote:I had a picture that I was really not happy with, so I hacked it up in Photoshop until it looked a bit better.

I don't recommend that, though, because the HDR result was much simpler and generally looks better too. It definitely looks less processed. I lost a bit of cloud detail with this particular batch of settings, but I felt it held up well enough that it didn't need to be B&W.http://jonathan.pearce.name/gallery/v/h ... ather.html

You have a spot on your lens I think. For $1500, do any of these lenses come with an automatic wiper?

Like I said originally, I'll probably get the 70-300mm. There's a 55-200mm DX VR that's substantially cheaper, but I think I'd prefer the slightly longer reach and ability to use with a full frame camera.

Actually you are not used to shooting at high ISO so let me be more expansive. I let the auto ISO on my D90 hunt up to 1600. Around 1000 it is usable with little to no NR. At 1600 good NR still results in a good image. If you take a look at the D3, it has usable ISO out to 12800. Full frame is never going to reach down to Nikon's entry level DSLRs, but I fully expect there will be something in the prosumer line for me.

At f/1.8 I get good exposures with regular living room light at night. With a D3, you're looking at available light in parties @ f/1.4. That is why I only want to buy fast glass if I can.

Kickball shoot went well. Most of my fail was a result of me reading online about the zone focusing system and being incompetent at using it. Mostly I trusted the AF and it did not let me down very much. VR is amazing technology and I want it now, dammit.

I shot like 1500 pictures, and after deleting the obvious bad ones I still have over a thousand. It's gonna be like 30 hours to upload these to the internet. But it's happening!

In the sun, I was shooting at f/4 or 5.6, 1/800s, ISO 200, so there's no need for a fast lens there. Once the sun went behind the trees, I was at f/2.8 for the rest of the night. By the end I was at iSO 1000+ to hit 1/800s, so I would definitely have to lose quite a bit of my ability to stop motion with the slower lens. In general, I think shooting in shadows at f/5.6 will work well, so I'm getting the 70-300. I don't expect to be doing much sports photography, but it was fun to try.

Gallery seemed to barf on a few hundred large fine jpgs, so I resized them and lowered the quality and tried again. I also had to futz with the stupid orientation because Gallery was getting confused sometimes. However, they're all good now.http://jonathan.pearce.name/gallery/v/events/kick0630/

This was a useful Makefile for doing the resize and fixing the orientation. I used make so I could trivially parallelize the processing. It's also the only time I've ever needed to use patsubst in a Makefile, but that's handy to have around.

Like the article I posted on skin tone, this guy's presentation is a bit off. I find he actually explains the precepts of portrait composition and perspective in a sensible way rather than proscribing an acceptable focal length.

He also has a bunch of flash info which I have not read. The lighting articles I did read were good.

Planning to take them in somewhere to get an estimate on repairs. I'm thinking I'll only repair the lens because everything on the body except the IS still works. If it turns out to be a cheap fix I'll do it, but somehow doubt that's the case. I was planning to upgrade to one of the new Sony bodies in a year or two anyway.

If the lens is not salvageable though I'm not sure if I can afford a new one right now. So I'll be stuck with 28mm prime and 50mm prime lenses for a while. I'd been using the 24-105mm lens almost exclusively out of laziness for the past year so this might be a good thing for me.

In fact I'd only brought the one lens to Ireland because I hadn't been using any other lenses so my main disappointment was that I ended up having to use my iPhone as my primary camera. At least I had the 3GS so the image quality was somewhat better than the 2G would have been.

The 28mm prime is pretty useless though. It's a f/2.8, which was only marginally better than the f/3.5-4.5 zoom had been, and the zoom lens was just a far superior lens all around. The 28mm looks like shit wide open and doesn't look that good until f/4 or so, which totally defeats the purpose.

My 50mm is f/1.7 and is a pretty quality piece of glass. I stopped using it mainly out of laziness.

I always talked about getting a telephoto but never got around to it and never had much of a need for one anyway. And I never had a need for anything wider than the 24. So I stopped buying lenses after my failed experiment with the 28mm which I had no reason to buy in the first place. At least it only cost $35.

It's been a loooooong time since I've thought about buying a new lens. I wasn't planning to do so until I made enough to afford the Zeiss Sonnar ones.

Note I have abandoned all pretense of showing pictures in chronological order. I think all my albums now sort pictures with the most views first. I just like to upload more than people actually like to see, but this is a like a low-key editor. Everyone needs an editor.

Friend of mine at work took a picture of a bridge downtown, put it on Flickr, and got quite a bit of attention. Now it's up for a contest. If you dig the picture, vote for it!

To my surprise, I have apparently made it into the semi finals of Pro Photo's “2009 Photo of the Year” contest…! Here is a link to the contest web site where you can cast your vote online (just follow the directions). I'm in the Top 100 Category.http://photooftheyear.net/page.asp?pageid=1462527410